TALL STRUCTURES RETROFITTING, ERECTION AND STABILITY

P. Surya Prakash

Abstract: Infrastructure for mobile communications has grown rapidly in the last two decades across world particularly more in India. The Technology upgrade and multiplying volumes called for retrofitting the existing infrastructure. Last two decades 250,000 towers were installed in india by individual service providers (SP) of mobile communications. The number of users has grown to 300 Mn and about 6 major SP. The competition among SP has brought in pressure to bring down the cost of infrastructure. This resulted in sharing of infrastructure already built by 2 to 6 SP. Communication towers, in addition to main supporting structure, have many accessory sub structures such as ladder, cable tray, platform etc. The computation of drag coefficient though detailed in Indian code is not very specific to the application. Although British code has dealt with accessories, it is again an approximation. The towers in India are primarily self-supporting steel lattice towers of heights ranging from 40m to 100m. They are composed of sections All Angles, All Tubes or Hybrid with bolted connections. The method of retrofitting is by additional member support.

Keywords: Lattice Tower, Retrofitting, Hybrid, DELTA Tower, RTT, GBT, TowerCAD

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15623/ijret.2016.0532007